Before the Flowers
Taking Root in Tended Ground | Essay One
A note before we begin: This is something new. For those of you who have followed Beyond the Bookshelf for a while, you know I spend most of my time here thinking about books — what they mean, what they ask of us, how they hold up a mirror to the life we are actually living. That is not changing. But I am adding a room to the house. “Taking Root in Tended Ground” is where I will write about faith — not from a pulpit, not with a seminary degree, not with all the answers. Just from where I am standing. Taking Root in Tended Ground takes its name from the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:1-8) — specifically the seed that fell on good soil and bore fruit. That is the aspiration, at least. You are welcome here regardless of where you land on any of it. That is the whole point.
Dear frends,
My father knows things about the ground that I have spent most of my life forgetting.
He could walk a field in early spring — the soil still cold and dark, nothing showing, nothing promising much of anything — and tell you what it would do by August. He’d pick up a fistful of dirt, crumble it between his fingers, and say something like this’ll do in a way that sounded less like optimism and more like a negotiated agreement between him and the earth. Then he’d put seeds in the ground and go about his business. He did not hover. He did not dig them back up three days later to check on their progress. He did not panic when April was cold and wet and nothing came up on schedule.
He planted in faith, and then he let the ground do what ground does.
I have spent most of my life being the opposite of that.
I grew up around agriculture but I did not grow up understanding patience the way he did. What I understood was movement. For twenty-four years in the Navy, I moved. New duty station, new city, new country, new challenge — pack the boxes, update the address, start over. There is a particular kind of freedom in that life and I do not regret a day of it. But there is also something it costs you that you don’t notice until later, when the moving stops and you look around and realize you have never really put down roots anywhere. You have lived in many places and belonged fully to none of them.
A tumbleweed travels a lot of ground. It does not bloom.
I was, for long stretches, a tumbleweed. I had been planted in good soil early — raised in a church community, drawn as a young man to the stories of the saints, the kind of kid who read The Lives of the Saints and wanted desperately to be that kind of person. Paul was the one who captured me most — this man who dropped everything, crossed oceans, took beatings, and kept going, because he genuinely believed the message was worth his life. I wanted that. I wanted to be sent. But somewhere in the years that followed, the planting never quite took hold. I was craving growth without the roots to support it. Wanting the fruit without the soil. Praying for something to bloom while quietly uprooting everything I’d started.
This past Sunday, our pastor, Chris Endsley, stood at the front of The Life Church and preached a sermon he called “May Flowers.” The title was deceptively simple. What followed was not.
He anchored everything in a single line from Psalm 92 — planted in the house of the Lord, they will flourish in the courts of our God — and then he asked the room a question that has been rattling around in my head ever since: do you actually want to flourish?
Not a trick question. Or maybe it is. Because most of us would say yes without hesitation, and then spend most of our actual lives doing things that answer no.
He said two things worth sitting with. The first: don’t pull up in fear what you planted in faith. The second: stop burying what God told you to plant.
Both of those hit differently depending on what season you’re in. I have done both. I have pulled things up in fear — relationships, communities, commitments — that I had planted with real intention, because the growth was slow and slowness felt like failure. And I have buried things — the sexual abuse I experienced as a teenager chief among them — because for a long time covering it over felt like the only thing available to me that resembled survival.
The technical term for neither of these behaviors, I think, is flourishing.
Here is what I know about seeds, from growing up watching the farmers in my community and from the Navy’s slightly more compressed version of growing things, which is called a plan and which also gets buried regularly: real growth is slow and invisible before it is visible. The roots go down before anything comes up. You don’t see the work happening. You just have to trust that it is.
We are not built for that. Culturally, structurally, temperamentally — we want the bloom first. We want the outcome before the process. We want to skip from planting to harvest and feel vaguely cheated when something as inconvenient as time insists on living in between.
I am in a different season now than I have been in a long time. Retired from the Navy, living in the same town for longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my adult life, going to the same church every Sunday, sitting in a life group, delivering food on Sunday mornings with my wife to people who need it. Doing the small, ordinary things that I used to dismiss as not quite enough — not enough movement, not enough scale, not enough visible impact.
But I think I may have had it backwards. I think the ordinary things, done faithfully, in the same soil, over time — that is where roots happen. That is how a tumbleweed stops tumbling.
I have not seen the flourishing yet. I mean that literally — I cannot point to it and say there it is. But I can feel something happening that I do not have a better word for than down. Things going down. Deeper. The way roots go before anything comes up.
My father would recognize it. He’d pick up a fistful of it and say this’ll do.
I do not know exactly what this space will become. I know it will be honest. I know it will be grounded in scripture and in the belief that the life of Christ has something to say about the life we are each trying to live — whether you share that belief or are just curious about why someone might. I know it will not be perfect, because I am not, and the whole point of planting something is that you do not yet know what it will look like when it grows.
But the ground is tended. The seeds are in.
Let’s see what this season brings.
Matthew Long is a writer and retired sailor living in rural western Tennessee.
"If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are."- Wendell Berry
Rootedness in our culture is never celebrated but I think it is what we need as a society to bring us back to our families and communities.
Great piece Matt.
Hello Matthew. What a wonderful piece of writing and depth of experience. As I was reading, my thoughts went back to one of the first articles of yours I ever read where you disclosed what you had so long hidden. That kind of betrayal and trauma impacts flourishing and can quite literally pluck someone up by the roots and thrash them against every hard surface they encounter. You have overcome so much to now be approaching your youthful purposes from a stronger, more whole place. I am genuinally delighted that you are seeking to flourish and sowing with the view to reap beauty. God's best to you. Thank you for sharing.